Table of Contents

Q401 - ZIP archive format selected
Description
Workaround
About JoomlaPack warnings

Q401 - ZIP archive format selected

Severity: Low

Description

You have selected to use the ZIP archive format. You should be aware of certain limitations concerning the creation of ZIP archives:

  • It is very disk and database intensive; on some overloaded hosts the process might fail during the archiving stage

  • A ZIP file consists of two parts: the actual file data and the Central Directory, an appendix to the archive with a list of the included files. For efficiency reasons the Central Directory is written on a separate file and the two files are "glued" together at the end of the process. On sites with a great number of files, this might cause the process to fail.

  • There are several limitation concerning the calculation of CRC checksums, a necessary step for creating ZIP archives. JoomlaPack can detect most of them and warn you, as failure to calculate correct CRC's will result in non-conforming archives requiring several workarounds to extract them. Moreover, even on newer systems, the calculation of a large file's CRC might cause the process to fail with a timeout.

Workaround

As an alternative, we suggest you to use the JPA Archive Format, the renowned archive format of JoomlaPack which is much more efficient during archiving and extraction.

About JoomlaPack warnings

JoomlaPack detects potential issues which might negatively impact the backup process. Many of them are caused by specific PHP configurations. The cause of those issues is mostly or thoroughly known, but since it resides in the server configuration which JoomlaPack can not control we can't provide some "patch" or bug fix to solve them. We try to provide practical solutions or workarounds instead.

The severity of each of these warnings is displayed on the top of this help screen. There are three levels: low, medium and high. The "Low" level implies that the detected issue will most probably have no impact on you. "Medium" level warnings have a higher chance of causing problems, but the proposed workaround may be applied to alleviate its effects. "High" level warnings should be treated as errors; the detected issue will cause backup failure unless the proposed workaround is applied.

Remember, if all else fails, contact us on our support forum . We are here to help you. Please, before posting to the forum, try to follow the "workaround" procedure outlined above and tell us that you did try the proposed solution before asking us for support.